millisonecological.com

Messaging has also gotten some fine-tuning in this version. You’ll now be able to save drafts of your messages to finish compiling later, and manage the draft as you would an e-mail to delete, re-edit, and send the message. MySpace for BlackBerry also gets a boost of velocity in the notification and updates department, cutting down the lag time between when an update or message was sent and when it’s received.

As a nod to MySpace’s popularity with emerging artists, band profiles now let rockers and crooners post tour dates and details from the road, including the venue, address, and ticket price. (The profile is accessible from the Menu button.)

This week, MySpace released an update to MySpace for BlackBerry that pads the original downloadable app with more speed, convenience, and a bit of European flair.

To download the free application, point your BlackBerry browser to http://blackberry.com/myspace. If you already have the app, the update will be pushed to your phone the next time you open MySpace for BlackBerry.

Finally, BlackBerry for MySpace gets continental in version 1.5 with support for German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Version 1.5 adds a new navigation icon for viewing friends’ updates from within the app. In addition, when you click the thumbnail photo next to a friend’s status message, the app moves you to a full-screen version for more leisurely reading. This has been a top-requested feature since version 1.0 was released, and all we can say is, it’s about time.

A database and API to access phishing and scam sites will be used in Chrome (and made public), which will hopefully reduce “zero-day” scam exploits. The browser will be constantly updated with this information.

Chrome’s URL entry field will be called the “Omnibox,” and, like Mozilla’s “Awesome bar,” will feed you suggestions based on your browsing history and live search results. It will be respectful of users, the comic says: “Inline completions will never flicker, never flash. It’s perfect, aesthetically non-distracting.”

Chrome will integrate URL entry and search queries into the Omnibox.

Yes, this is big
CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber’s analysis of Google Chrome Monday was this: “It would be in line with other Google open-source projects, such as OpenSocial and Google Gears. Creating a competitor to
Firefox, as well as Internet Explorer and Opera, could spur more innovation.”

(Credit: Google Blogoscoped)

The browser’s start page will show thumbnails or previews of the user’s most visited sites.

Coverage on Techmeme

“Open sourcing the code is a smart way to avoid the ‘Google wants to take over the world’ fear, but it seems that Google has ambitions to create a comprehensive Internet operating system, including a browser, applications, middleware and cloud infrastructure.”

A Web comic, reposted on Google Blogoscoped, introduces Google Chrome.

No official confirmation from Google yet, although Kara Swisher of All Things D cites sources who say that Google will make a Chrome download available to users by as early as tomorrow.

(Credit: Google Blogoscoped)

Kara Swisher: Google Ignites a New Browser War With Microsoft By Unveiling One of its Own This Week

Update at 2:36 p.m. PDT: It’s official: Google Chrome will be available Tuesday.

The detailed, 38-page comic appeared on Google Blogoscoped, an unofficial Google blog. Update: The comic is now available on Google Book Search. The book is broken down into five main sections covering stability; speed; search and the user experience, security, and standards. Here are the key features, according to the book:

Speed
The browser is being written with WebKit, the open-source engine at the core of Apple’s
Safari and Google’s Android. The browser is also getting a new Javascript virtual machine, V8. It’s said to be a better solution for complex and rich Web applications–it should yield better performance as well as “smoother drag and drops” in interactive applications.

Word surfaced Monday of a Web “comic book” introducing Google Chrome, the search giant’s long-rumored open-source browser project. While the illustrations, created by cartoonist Scott McCloud, were not announced by Google, they do contain the quotes and likenesses of 19 Google developers.

Google is using its search index to prioritize testing of the browser–the pages that are linked to the most from Google Search are getting the most automated hits to make sure Chrome is behaving correctly on them.

(Credit: Google Blogoscoped)

See also:

Stability
Each tab will run in its own process. These processes will be completely isolated from each other, will be killable from the operating system’s process manager, and will be sandboxed to prevent them from accessing information on the user’s computer. This architecture should lead to a more stable and more consistent browsing experience–performance of the browser should not degrade over time.

Search and user experience
In Chrome, browser tabs will take over the interface, becoming the primary navigational element. Each tab will get its own window controls. Users will be able to tear off tabs into standalone windows. (Related: developers will be able to control which window controls appear in a tab, creating, if they wish, Web applications that are embedded in a browser but that appear to be more like traditional desktop apps.)

The browser’s default start page will show thumbnails of the user’s most frequently visited pages and a list of their top searches. There will also be a private browsing mode, as
IE 8 has.

Browser tabs will be detachable.

Standards
The browser will be released as an open-source project. Also, Google will build the open-source local runtime Gears into the browser, and is hoping that it is taking up widely to “improve the base functionality of all browsers.”

(Credit: Google Blogoscoped)

Security
Chrome’s architecture lends itself to secure browsing. Each Web page, or tab, runs in its own process, and is blocked from accessing other processes on the computer. “We’ve taking the existing process boundary,” the comic says, “and made it into a jail.” Different and more flexible permissions are being developed for plug-ins, however.

Click here for full coverage by CNET News of the Google Chrome launch.

Below is a video showing a staged cyber attack on a power station that Winkler showed during his presentation:

First, you set up a Web server that downloads spyware onto the computers that visit.

“I will tell (you) how to break into a nuclear reactor,” Ira Winkler, president of security firm ISAG said as he launched into his presentation on “How to Take Down the Power Grid” at RSA 2008 on Tuesday night.

It took about a day to set up the attack and was effective within minutes, according to Winkler.

Third, you wait as the recipients–and everyone else they forwarded the e-mail to–visit the server and get infected.

“It had to be shut down after a couple of hours because it was working too well,” he said.

This is akin to social engineering attacks that happen all the time, but this attack has more far-reaching consequences than most such attacks.

“Things are really this bad,” Winkler said. “I’m not exaggerating.”

“Then we had full system control,” he said. “Once the malware was downloaded onto their systems…we could see the screens and manipulate the cursors.”

“Frankly, it’s really easy to break into the power grid,” he said. “It happens all the time.”

Power stations running special SCADA control software have the perception that they are more secure than other networked systems. However, they are just as vulnerable because they are connected to the Internet and run on computers that also run Windows NT, he said.

Second, you send an e-mail to people who work inside a power station that entices them to click on a hyperlink to the Web server with the spyware. Warning them that their human resources benefits are going to be cut and sending them to a Web site with “hr.com” in the domain would work, according to Winkler, who said he has done this several times in company-approved penetration tests.

Qwitter might satisfy some people’s curiosity, but the knowledge that the person was not going to find out when you stop following them has been wiped away. You now have to be more conscious of your un-following habits.

John Gruber (gruber) stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet:

What’s the difference between Arial and Helvetica?

After signing up for the service, when someone stops following you on Twitter, you will receive an email stating who stopped following and after which tweet. Qwitter’s site gives the following example.

A new service, called Qwitter, has debuted today, allowing users to find out when others stop following them on Twitter. From time to time, you are going to lose followers, whether it be because you have said something that your followers don’t agree with, or because they no longer find your tweets relevant or interesting. Services like Facebook and Twitter intentionally don’t expose the data for when someone de-friends or un-follows you because it can potentially be a sensitive issue. Qwitter is trying to tap into the “too curious for their own good” market.

To be fair, Philips has definitely struggled to compete in the flat-panel TV market. Though the company has attempted to differentiate its brand with Ambilight technology aimed at home theater enthusiasts, it still trailed the big guys, like Sony, Panasonic, and Sharp, in both production and panache.

And so begins the thinning of the herd. The television market is becoming an especially tough business, as prices continue to fall and more inexpensive brands like Vizio and Olevia attempt to edge out the traditional market leaders. Pioneer, a leader in plasma TV tech, also recently announced it would sell TVs but no longer make its own plasma panels.

Instead, it is transferring that job to Japanese electronics maker Funai. The two companies agreed to a brand-licensing agreement in which Funai will source, distribute, market and sell all consumer TVs under the Philips and Magnavox brand names in the U.S. and Canada.

Philips is a top-tier television maker–it won the Best of CES 2008 Best in Show Award from my CNET Reviews colleague David Katzmaier for its Eco TV–and Funai is, well, not as a highly regarded. This is a boon to Funai, and Chief Executive Tetsuro Funai’s comment is pretty much the understatement of the year: “As a premium brand, Philips will add lustre to our existing portfolio.”

This means that though the Philips brand name will live on in the U.S., the materials inside those televisions aren’t necessarily the same. But the biggest blow is to brand perception.

The deal begins September 1 and is good for five years. Funai will pay a royalty to Philips.

(Credit:
Philips)

“This agreement secures continued presence of Philips and Magnavox branded TVs in North America in a model that safeguards Philips profitability in this highly competitive market,” Philips said in a statement Tuesday.

Beginning in September, Funai will distribute all Philips TV in the U.S. and Canada.

As of September, Philips will no longer make televisions for the U.S. and Canada.

Court documents filed by MBTA suggest that representatives of the transit agency tried to pressure the students into halting their talk. During a meeting with the students and MIT professor Ron Rivest on Monday, MBTA Deputy General Manager for Systemwide Modernization Joseph Kelly unsuccessfully tried to obtain a copy of their planned presentation. Kelly spoke with Rivest again on Friday. (There was initial confusion about whether the meeting was Monday or Tuesday.)

A representative of the Defcon convention, who asked that her name not be used, said that the students submitted their Powerpoint presentation at least a month ago. The presentation says–not-so-presciently–”what this talk is not: evidence in court (hopefully).” It also says: “THIS IS VERY ILLEGAL! So the following material is for educational use only.”

(Credit:
Declan McCullagh/CNET News)

In 2005, Cisco Systems filed a lawsuit against security researcher Michael Lynn hours after he gave a talk at Defcon on how attackers could take over Cisco routers. The case was ultimately settled. Four years earlier, the FBI took Russian crypto expert Dmitry Sklyarov into custody at his Las Vegas hotel one day after he gave a presentation at Defcon on insecurities in e-book security software.

U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock on Saturday ordered the students not to provide “program, information, software code, or command that would assist another in any material way to circumvent or otherwise attack the security of the Fare Media System.” Woodlock granted the MBTA’s request after a hastily convened hearing in Massachusetts that took place at 8 a.m. PDT on Saturday.

[Note: This story was updated at 12:05 p.m. PDT to reflect that a temporary restraining order was issued. It was again updated at 1:30 p.m. PDT with more details from documents on how the hacks can be done, and at 4:30 p.m. with a report from the EFF press conference and 6:15 p.m. with video.]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the students, anticipates appealing the ruling, said EFF senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl.

EFF staff attorney Kurt Opsahl said that the temporary restraining order is “violating their First Amendment rights”; another EFF attorney said a court order pre-emptively gagging security researchers was “unprecedented.”

First page of subway-hacking presentation that was the subject of an injunction to stop its distribution–after it had already been distributed.

The document also discusses the lack of physical security at the MBTA. “Doors were left unlocked allowing free entry in many subways,” the document says. “The turnstile control boxes were unlocked at most stations. Most shocking, however, were the FVM control rooms that were occasionally left open.”

Research into flaws in the encryption that the Mifare Classic cards, used by the MBTA, landed Dutch researchers in court recently. NXP sued to block a Dutch University from publishing information about vulnerabilities in the encryption used in the RFID cards around the world. Last month, a court ruled that the university could publish the information.

In the video clip below MIT student Zack Anderson tells reporters how he felt when he learned about the lawsuit filed by the MBTA. The lawsuit was filed a few days after he had met with the agency to discuss concerns about his talk at Defcon. He is with fellow MIT students R.J. Ryan, Alessandro Chiesa and EFF attorney Marcia Hofmann, who was advising the students about what they could say in lieu of the temporary restraining order against them.

But then the conversations took a hostile turn when MBTA mentioned an FBI criminal investigation of the MIT students. In the “initial contact, they said the FBI was investigating and that was not–we didn’t find that to be a very pleasing way to start a nice dialogue with them. And we got a little concerned about what was happening,” said Anderson, one of the students.

Karsten Nohl, a University of Virginia graduate student who worked with others to break the Mifare Classic crypto algorithm last year, said MBTA should not have sued researchers who voluntarily discussed their findings with them.

In addition, what looked like a black-and-white faxed copy of the entire presentation was entered as evidence in publicly available court records available on the Web on Saturday, meaning any attempt to limit its distribution further will encounter an additional hurdle.

Princeton University computer science professor Ed Felten and his co-authors received legal threats from the recording industry involving a planned talk at a Pittsburgh security conference–but pulled the paper from the event, even though no lawsuit materialized.

Also released as part of the public record was a document marked “confidential” and written by the researchers (PDF) that explains exactly how the Charlie cards can be cloned and forged. “Our research shows that one can write software that will generate cards of any value up to $655.36,” the document says.

Click here for more coverage from Defcon.

The undergraduate students had been scheduled to give a presentation Sunday afternoon at the Defcon hacker conference here that they had said would describe “several attacks to completely break the CharlieCard,” an RFID card that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority uses on the Boston T subway line. They also planned to release card-hacking software they had created, but canceled both the presentation and the release of the software.

Another excerpt from the presentation distributed to thousands of Defcon attendees on CDs.

This isn’t the first time speakers at security conferences have been hauled into court by companies seeking to muzzle them.

Those CDs were distributed to conference attendees starting Thursday evening, meaning the injunction arrived nearly two days late. (On the other hand, the source code to the utilities–not included on the CD–was removed from web.mit.edu/zacka/www/subway/ by Saturday morning.)

LAS VEGAS–A federal judge on Saturday granted the Massachusetts transit authority’s request for an injunction preventing three MIT students from giving a presentation about hacking smartcards used in the Boston subway system.

EFF’s Opsahl said the students only intended to “provide an interesting and useful talk, but not one that would allow people to defraud the Massachusetts” government.

(Credit: Elinor Mills)

MIT students Alessandro Chiesa, R.J. Ryan, Zack Anderson, and Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Kurt Opsahl speak at a panel turned press conference at Defcon.

“It has been known for years that magnetic stripe cards can easily be tampered with and MBTA should not have relied on the obscurity of their data-format as a security measure,” Nohl said. “MBTA made it clear that they are not interested in cooperating with researchers on identifying and fixing vulnerabilities, but their lawsuit will motivate more research into the security of Boston’s public transport system.”

MIT’s student newspaper has posted a copy of the presentation that was distributed on Defcon CDs and the subject of the court order.

EFF attorneys appeared with the three students–Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan, and Alessandro Chiesa–in front of a crowd of hundreds at an afternoon session at Defcon, but largely prevented them from answering questions, citing the lawsuit. Although Sunday’s talk is canceled, Defcon organizers hinted that there may be a related presentation on a similar topic.

The students told reporters that they had, on their own, asked their professor to initiate contact with the MBTA a week before the government agency contacted them on July 30 or July 31. But the process was delayed because professor Ron Rivest was at a security conference near San Francisco, and no contact with MBTA was made at the time.

That could be difficult to enforce. Every one of the thousands of people here who registered for Defcon received a CD with the students’ 87-page presentation titled “Anatomy of a Subway Hack.” It recounts, in detail, how they wrote code to generate fake magcards. Also, it describes how they were able to use software they developed and $990 worth of hardware to read and clone the RFID-based CharlieCards.

(Credit:
Declan McCullagh/CNET News)

The MBTA, which is a state government agency, alleges in its lawsuit that “disclosure of this information will significantly compromise the CharlieCard and CharlieTicket systems” and “constitutes a threat to public health or safety.”

Its suit asks a judge to order the students “from publicly stating or indicating that the security or integrity of the CharlieCard pass, the CharlieTicket pass, or the MBTA’s Fare Media systems has been compromised.” The requested order would also prevent them from circulating the summary of their talk, from providing any technical information, and from distributing any software they created.

One portion of the MBTA’s legal complaint that drew jeers from the Defcon crowd came in its odd claim that “A CharlieTicket standing alone constitutes a ‘computer’” under federal antihacking law.

Chiesa, Ryan, and Anderson at an Electronic Frontier Foundation panel.

CNET News.com’s Elinor Mills contributed to this report.

“Consumers need to know who are the legitimate recyclers that will not simply take their money and ship their old electronic materials for processing in developing countries or dispose of them in a landfill,” said Sarah Westervelt of the Basel Action Network.

WM Recycle America announced Wednesday it is committing to the Basel Action Network e-Stewards Pledge. Along with committing signatories to the statutes of the Basel Convention about exporting e-waste, the pledge also requires organizations to prevent hazardous e-waste from entering municipal incinerators or landfills.

Both Sony and LG Electronics have partnerships with Waste Management Recycle America, the largest residential recycler in the U.S., letting consumers drop off for free their old Sony, LG, Zenith, and GoldStar products at designated recycling centers. Now consumers making use of the service can be assured their e-waste is being handled according to the guidelines in the Basel Convention, an international treaty that sets standards for transboundary hazardous waste disposal.

Neither Congress nor the Bush administration is moving quickly to adopt international electronic-waste standards, but some technology companies are.

The United States is the only developed nation that has not ratified the Basel convention. The Government Accountability Office told Congress last week that should be remedied, so that recycling companies stop sending hazardous e-waste to developing countries.

Wall Street soothsayers point to comments in the press from Yahoo executives and its chairman on Monday that seem to point to a “rapprochement with Ballmer,” as noted in a blog by News.com’s Dan Farber. And analysts say the public outrage factor from Yahoo’s large institutional investors will go a long way in pushing the companies back to the table.

Roy Bostock, Yahoo chairman, is quoted as saying: “We said, considering all of these hard data, what we should do is say we think a fair value for the company is $37. It was not a take-it-or-leave it statement.” He said Microsoft did not respond to that price other than to withdraw its offer,” according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Moran noted that Yang’s comments that Yahoo remained open to talks and Bostock’s indication the $37 a share was not a take-it-or-leave it price point to Yahoo making the next price change in a rematch.

But by the end of the regular trading day, Yahoo closed up 5.54 percent to $25.72 a share.

“To say, ‘we never got the $33 a share offer in writing’ implies they don’t want to beg,” said Clayton Moran, an analyst with the Stanford Group. “A verbal offer should have been pretty solid, in this case. So, to say you never got it in writing, and therefore it’s not a hard offer, potentially indicates you are open to further talks.”

The $34 to $35 price range that a large slug of Yahoo’s institutional investors are clamoring for seems to be a good point of reference for a next move by Yahoo.

Editors note: This post was updated Tuesday, May 6, at 2:16 p.m. PDT to reflect the market’s close.

Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s CEO, said his company would listen “should somebody else come back someday and want to buy the company,” according to a Bloomberg News article.

Sue Decker, Yahoo’s president, said Microsoft never gave Yahoo a written confirmation of its sweetened $33 a share bid…noting, “The work our board did was to go around and talk to shareholders at the price Microsoft offered in writing, which was $31 a share,” according to Sarah Lacy’s Tech|ticker blog.

Yahoo shares broke through the low zone Tuesday, reaching as high as $26.25 to exceed the lowest level the shares were trading during the three-month period when Microsoft still had its buyout offer on the table.

Here are some snippets from various interviews with the press that Yahoo executives and its chairman conducted Monday. A picture emerges of a company that would very much like to get back to the negotiating table and one where Yahoo wouldn’t be so wedded to that deal-killer, errr, make that $37-a-share buyout demand:

Analysts say such comments appear to signal Yahoo is making an attempt to get back to the negotiating table, in a face-saving manner.

On Tuesday, however, analysts say investors drove the stock up, based on renewed hope a deal will be struck between the two companies.

Coincidentally, that’s the same exact spot Yahoo shares fell to during their lowest point in the three months that Microsoft’s buyout bid was pending. Microsoft withdrew the bid over the weekend and on Monday, investors punished Yahoo, sending its shares down 15 percent.

Fast, which specializes in enterprise search, was acquired by Microsoft earlier this year for $1.2 billion.

Microsoft didn’t mention the charges in a statement, but it confirmed that police showed up at its offices Thursday.

Microsoft’s recently acquired Fast Search & Transfer was charged on Thursday with accounting fraud by Norwegian officials, Reuters reported Thursday.

“We can confirm that the Norwegian Police for Economic Crime this morning conducted inquiries at Fast’s offices in Oslo,” the software maker said in a statement. “Microsoft and its subsidiary Fast Search & Transfer (are) cooperating fully with the police inquiries. We are not in a position to make any further comments at this time.”

According to the Reuters report, police raided Fast’s offices in Oslo in order to preserve evidence.

Related: Five ways to master bookmarks in Firefox 3

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Each time you bookmark a new site a thumbnail will be created and stored away. It will also go back into pre-existing bookmarks and grab thumbnails the first time they’re added, giving you a rather large library to look at. My collection took about five minutes to get converted and came up about 50 percent blank. There’s currently no way to have it go out again and fetch newer, updated versions–something I hope is added in a later version.

While not nearly as cool as the Muxtape playlist viewer we wrote about a few months back, if you’re looking to add a little extra eye candy to your bookmarks folder, it’s worth checking out an extension called Bookmarks Preview. When installed, it adds two new views to your bookmarks folder that let you surf your bookmarked sites with small thumbnail previews. You can either view them in a large grid, or Apple Cover Flow-style, which will scale up each thumbnail to a maximum of about 440 pixels wide.

[via Lifehacker]